By Patrick Jackson on 2025-02-25 23:25 in Joomla! Volunteer Engagement Team

The world has changed over the past 4 years. So has Joomla.

The lockdown benefited the Joomla project imensely by allowing Joomla 4 to be completed after over a decade of development. The increased availability of developers and contributors who filled their lockdown time with Joomla saw many aspects of the project accelerated during 2020 & 2021.

Development has continued by a dedicated core team seeing the release of Joomla 5 in October 2023. The Joomla roadmap is keeping the development pace going at the moment with Joomla 5.3 Beta 1 now available, and work is beginning on Joomla 6.

Benefits of Volunteering

For many involved in the Joomla project, their volunteering is tied to their use of Joomla as their CMS of choice, and so in giving back to Joomla, Joomla gets to be a better overall product, and they benefit from their contributions becoming part of the core, making the CMS better for themselves and their clients. For many, their involvement with Joomla goes back now over 20 years back to before Joomla when the project was Mambo.

For some, post-pandemic their businesses returned to normal and were fortunate enough to have needed to prioritise their volunteering against the influx of work on projects that consume more of their available time.

Others found they needed to pivot due to their previous jobs or roles not recovering and left the Joomla project behind. Competition among CMS solutions has also increased, and many that were looking at a simpler solution may have moved to SaaS solutions, or switched to targeted platforms like Shopify for ECommerce feeling that the offerings with Joomla are not sufficient.

Changes to Open Source Matters

There's been a number of structural changes to Open Source Matters, the foundation that runs the Joomla Project, which have impacted activities. Organisational change often does not go as smoothly as perhaps intended, and a number of Outreach Department teams currently remain without team leaders, team members or continue a hiatus.

At the end of 2021 OSM's structure changed and the VET moved from the Program Directorate to the new Outreach Department (which merged the previous Program, Events and Marketing directorates together).

November 2022 saw Joomla switch from using the Glip communications platform to Mattermost.

Volunteer Engagement

During the past 4 years, the VET has been inactive in regards to formal meetings and activities, taking care of enquiries from potential volunteers, but not able to spend much time on implementing programs. The majority of the VET team additionally are among the core group of volunteers mentioned above, with all active members of the team currently involved in major roles with Production, Operations and other Outreach teams, as well as positions on the Open Source Matters board.

In 2025 as we look to reconvene with Angelika Prox-Dampha as the new Outreach DC there's several project that VET can quickly work to improve uptake on in the community:

• Joomla released a range of Holopins in mid 2024. That's a way volunteers can be recognised on their Joomla Github profiles for work they've done, and this can be expanded for special projects into the future.
• VET are looking forward to working more with the Joomla! Enhancement Development Team to work with students on programs like GSoC.
• VET hope to help create more awareness around the recently announced Joomla Academy program and turn student involvement in the shorter term academy programs into more substantial long term volunteer involvement.
• A variety of previous teams established under the old department structure need housekeeping and review - from Education Outreach and Joomla Certification Program, to Local Community Marketing liaison and even planning for future Joomla World Conferences. VET will work with Outreach Department to try and create engagement programs to reinstate some of these in future if they're seen to be able to contribute back to Joomla.

Moving forward...

Reach out on Mattermost in the OR Volunteer Engagement channel to join the discussion and suggest further ideas as to where we can go with volunteer engagement with Joomla into the future as we work out where VET fits in the Joomla Outreach department going forward.